President Trump had just taken office when lawyers for Mayor Eric Adams of New York went to the White House with an extraordinary request: They formally asked in a letter that the new president pardon the mayor in a federal corruption case that had yet to go to trial.
Just a week later, one of Mr. Trump’s top political appointees at the Justice Department called Mr. Adams’s lawyer, saying he wanted to talk about potentially dismissing the case.
What followed was a rapid series of exchanges between the lawyers and Mr. Trump’s administration that exploded this week into a confrontation between top Justice Department officials in Washington and New York prosecutors.
On Monday, the acting No. 2 official at the Justice Department sent a memo ordering prosecutors to dismiss the charges against the mayor. By Thursday, the acting U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Danielle Sassoon, had resigned in protest over what she described as a quid pro quo between the Trump administration and the mayor of New York City. Five officials overseeing the Justice Department’s public integrity unit in Washington stepped down soon after.
The conflagration originated in the back-and-forth between Mr. Adams’s lawyers, Alex Spiro and William A. Burck, and the Justice Department official, Emil Bove III, exchanges which have not been previously reported.
The series of events — in which the acting No. 2 official at the Justice Department seemed to guide criminal defense lawyers toward a rationale for dropping charges against a high-profile client — represents an extraordinary shattering of norms for an agency charged with enforcing the laws of the United States.
It also sends a message that, under the Trump administration, the Justice Department will make prosecutorial decisions based not on the merits of a case but on purely political concerns, longtime prosecutors and defense lawyers said.
Prompted by Mr. Bove, the mayor’s lawyers refined their approach until they landed on a highly unorthodox argument, records and interviews show — one that was ultimately reflected in Mr. Bove’s memo to prosecutors on Monday. That memo stated that the criminal case had “unduly restricted Mayor Adams’s ability” to address illegal immigration and violent crime. It also pointedly said that the decision had nothing to do with the evidence or the law.
This account of what led to Mr. Bove’s memo and the internal resistance with which it was met is based on interviews with five people with direct knowledge of the matter, as well as documents related to the case against Mr. Adams.
There remain several unanswered questions about the lead-up to the extraordinary decision, including how many times Mr. Spiro and Mr. Bove interacted.
But the sudden push to dismiss the case against Mr. Adams came even as Manhattan prosecutors were preparing to move forward with more charges against him.
Just weeks before the order to drop the case, prosecutors had said in a court filing submitted on Jan. 6, during the presidential transition, that they had uncovered unspecified “additional criminal conduct by Adams.”
In a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi on Wednesday, Ms. Sassoon said that prosecutors in her office had been prepared to seek a new indictment of the mayor, “based on evidence that Adams destroyed and instructed others to destroy evidence and provide false information to the F.B.I., and that would add further factual allegations regarding his participation in a fraudulent straw donor scheme.”
Mr. Spiro shot back in a public statement, saying that if the Manhattan prosecutors “had any proof whatsoever that the mayor destroyed evidence, they would have brought those charges — as they continually threatened to do, but didn’t, over months and months.”
But in private, far from a courtroom, the picture was different. Amid rumblings of potential new charges, Mr. Spiro, Mr. Burck and Mr. Bove appear to have structured what the defense lawyers likely hoped would be the end of the corruption case against Mr. Adams.
On Wednesday, the same day that the acting U.S. attorney was privately saying she would not comply with the Justice Department’s directive, Mr. Spiro held a news conference and repeatedly called the charges politically motivated, saying that the Justice Department’s dismissal order was the only legitimate conclusion it could have reached.
The directive from Mr. Bove was like a neon sign signaling that a connection within Mr. Trump’s orbit matters as much as the facts. Until recently, Mr. Bove was a criminal defense lawyer for Mr. Trump. Mr. Spiro also represents Elon Musk, a close adviser to Mr. Trump and the world’s richest man. And Mr. Burck recently became the outside ethics adviser to Mr. Trump’s company.
“The message is getting out that if you want to save yourself from prosecution, it’s best to find someone from Trumpworld,” said Daniel C. Richman, a law professor at Columbia University and former federal prosecutor in Manhattan. “Why is that bad? Generally, we like to think criminal prosecutions are resolved on the merits, not political intervention.”
The White House did not respond to several requests for comment. Officials at the Justice Department declined to engage with questions about the reporting.
Mr. Adams was indicted in September after a yearslong investigation. Manhattan prosecutors charged him with conspiracy, bribery and other crimes, saying that he had accepted more than $100,000 in flight upgrades and airline tickets; pressured the city’s Fire Department to sign off on the opening of a new high-rise Turkish consulate building despite safety concerns; and fraudulently obtained millions of dollars in public funds for his campaign.
The mayor pleaded not guilty. His informal efforts to win a pardon began shortly after Mr. Trump’s victory in the presidential election. The mayor sharpened his position on immigration, refused to say Vice President Kamala Harris’s name the day before the election, met with Mr. Trump near Mar-a-Lago and attended the inauguration.
The formal, legal effort to kill the case began immediately after Mr. Trump took office. Mr. Spiro sent a letter directly to the White House counsel, David Warrington, requesting a pretrial pardon from Mr. Trump. On his first day in office, Mr. Trump signed roughly 1,500 pardons, all prepared by Mr. Warrington, for people convicted in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.
The letter from Mr. Spiro appeared to be focused on appealing to Mr. Trump’s own grievances with how the Justice Department treated him. It echoed the president’s arguments about the federal cases against him. It said that Mayor Adams was the victim of a “weaponized” Justice Department and leaks to the news media, particularly to The New York Times. It also mounted a lengthy attack on the merits of the case.
“President Trump has made clear his desire to reform the Department of Justice so that it is an agency that once again seeks justice and truth above all else,” Mr. Spiro wrote. “This case is a prime example.”
Mr. Trump had said in December that he would consider pardoning the mayor. But in the days after the letter was sent, the White House had been silent on the matter.
Around that time, the acting deputy attorney general, Mr. Bove, who represented Mr. Trump in three of his criminal indictments, reached out to Mr. Spiro.
In one of the conversations, Mr. Bove said that he would like to know how the prosecution was affecting Mr. Adams’s ability to do his job. Mr. Bove also said he wanted to have a meeting in Washington with prosecutors and Mr. Spiro to discuss dismissing the case.
That meeting occurred on Jan. 31, 11 days after Mr. Trump was sworn in.
Mr. Spiro — a brash defense lawyer with a record of representing celebrity clients like Mr. Musk — had repeatedly angered prosecutors with his contentious style, outlandish claims and unsupported accusations that the authorities were leaking confidential grand jury evidence.
But he was accompanied at the meeting by Mr. Burck, who is known for having a softer touch and has become increasingly close to Mr. Trump, his aides and his political appointees. Along with his appointment last month as the outside ethics adviser to the Trump Organization, Mr. Burck helped lead the confirmation process of the Treasury secretary.
The meeting was attended by Ms. Sassoon and several of her deputies.
During the meeting, Mr. Bove signaled that the decision about whether to dismiss the case had nothing to do with its legal merits.
Instead, Mr. Bove said he was interested in whether the case was hindering Mr. Adams’s leadership, particularly with regard to the city’s ability to cooperate with the federal government on Mr. Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration.
Mr. Bove also said he was interested in whether the case, brought by the former U.S. attorney, Damian Williams, was a politically motivated prosecution meant to hurt Mr. Adams’s re-election prospects.
In her letter to Ms. Bondi, Ms. Sassoon said that she was “baffled by the rushed and superficial process by which this decision was reached, in seeming collaboration with Adams’s counsel and without my direct input on the ultimate stated rationales for dismissal.”
She also said that when she and other prosecutors attended the meeting, Mr. Adams’s lawyers “repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo, indicating that Adams would be in a position to assist with the department’s enforcement priorities only if the indictment were dismissed.” She said that Mr. Bove had chastised a member of her team for taking notes and directed that they be confiscated when the meeting ended.
Asked to respond, Mr. Spiro said, “The idea that there was a quid pro quo is a total lie. We offered nothing and the department asked nothing of us.
“We were asked if the case had any bearing on national security and immigration enforcement, and we truthfully answered it did,” he added.
Four days after the meeting, Mr. Adams’s team sent a letter to Mr. Bove at the Justice Department, this one signed by both Mr. Spiro and Mr. Burck. The letter showed the issues Mr. Bove was focused on.
“We wanted to address questions you have raised with respect to the indictment’s impact on Mayor Adams’s ability to lead New York City, including by working with the federal government on important issues of immigration enforcement and national security,” the letter said.
The letter went on to make a more refined argument about how the indictment was impinging on Mr. Adams’s role as mayor, while also attacking Mr. Williams for what it said was a politically motivated investigation.
The letter also said that trial preparation would unduly restrict Mr. Adams and that the trial itself would keep him stuck in court, potentially for more than a month. It said that Mr. Adams’s loss of a security clearance during the inquiry had hurt his ability to cooperate with federal authorities on important national security investigations.
And it asserted that Mr. Adams was aligned with the Trump administration on public safety and illegal immigration. If the prosecution proceeded, the letter said, Mr. Adams could not be an active partner to the Department of Homeland Security.
Despite those arguments — or perhaps in light of them — Mr. Bove’s directive to Manhattan federal prosecutors included an unusual footnote.
“The government is not offering to exchange dismissal of a criminal case for Adams’s assistance on immigration enforcement,” it said.
Mr. Spiro has asserted that the case against Mr. Adams, if dropped, will not be revived, but the Justice Department memo left open the possibility that it could be brought again. It said that Mr. Trump’s pick for U.S. attorney in Manhattan, who has yet to be confirmed by the Senate, will review the case after the mayoral election in November.
Mr. Spiro insisted on Wednesday that the plan would not give the Trump administration leverage over Mr. Adams.
“This isn’t hanging over anybody’s head,” he said. “This case is over. I think everybody knows this case.”
The mayor met on Thursday with Mr. Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan.
Afterward, Mr. Adams announced he would issue an order allowing federal immigration authorities into the Rikers Island jail complex.
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